John Oliver has taken on a few brands, in his Last Week Tonight show on HBO. Especially those with stupid activation and advertising. Sample a few below.
India needs him or one such guy to showcase a few ridiculous ads being aired now. Yes, there is Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) which pursues self-regulation in advertising in India. But, ASCI takes ridiculously long to pass a judgement (if you don’t pay) and is too weak to enforce its ruling. The result is that brands get away with murder. The only way is to “shame” some of these brands into not doing some such thing in future!
Sample the following ads for Airtel 4G…
The ads which claim ‘Airtel 4G’ is the ‘fastest network ever’, ‘download a movie in 3 minutes’, ‘upload an album in 1 minute’ and ‘if your network is faster, we will pay your mobile bills for life’… started appearing in print in August (7th to be precise). ASCI took more than 3 months (September 24th was the first ruling which was appealed and November 24th was the final ruling) to rule that these ads are ‘misleading by omission’. In the mean time, Airtel pumped in hundreds of crores into print, outdoor, digital and TV communicating these ‘misleading’ messages.
Then variations of this message started appearing. During September, there was not one but five different complaints against Bharti Airtel, in which four were for promotions of its 4G services! Claims like, ‘get the same data benefits as your 3G pack and enjoy superfast 4G speeds at no extra cost’; ‘free 4G Upgrade’; ‘unlimited calls, unlimited movies, unlimited music and loads of data, offered in Airtel 4G’ and ‘unlimited calling, only with Airtel 4G’, were all found to be ‘false and misleading’ or ‘misleading by omission’. Check a few complaints here, I am sure there are more to follow next month!
